Blue Prism raises over $120 million to bolster RPA capabilities

It was announced today that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) specialists Blue Prism have raised $124 million (£100 million) in equity financing bringing their RPA business to a total valuation of roughly $1.24 billion (£1 billion).

Jason Kingdon, CEO and Chair, Blue Prism mentioned that the investment will be used to bolster their existing RPA capabilities and expand the company’s automation suite.

The funding, which brings Blue Prism’s total raised to nearly $200 million, comes after it achieved the fastest revenue growth of all large U.K. public software companies for the fourth consecutive year in 2019. This included an 83% increase in revenue to $125.74 million (£101 million) in the first half of 2019 and $170 million (£137 million) today.

Kingdon wrote about the successful fundraising round in an email to VentureBeat saying: “In this environment, our RPA solution is arguably more important than ever in driving organisational adaptation and resilience, and our role as a strategic technology partner to our customers in many ways becomes more vital,”.

Blue Prism joins a list of other companies that are successfully getting funding during the COVID-19 pandemic with Adverity, H1 Insights, and Previse all recently completing funding rounds.

Blue Prism’s platform is built on Microsoft .NET and automates a wide range of apps on any platform including mainframes, Windows machines, and the web in environments ranging from terminal emulators to web browsers and services.

Blue Prism’s platform is designed for multi-environment deployment models allowing for both physical and logical access controls, with a centralised release management interface and process change distribution framework that provide a level of visibility.

During 2019, Blue Prysm witnessed rapid growth where its customer base grew to 1,677 enterprise accounts as it added 700 new clients through 2019. Currently, Blue Prism has 1,819 customers, including Microsoft, Accenture, Google, IBM, Heineken, and Jaguar Land Rover to name but a few.

The company was founded in 2001, in 2003 their first commercial product, Automate, launched in general availability, and in 2016 Blue Prism became a publicly-traded company with a listing on the London Stock Exchange.

RPA has recently grabbed a lot of attention with the coronavirus pandemic and as a result, Blue Prism launched a COVID-19 response task team.

Their COVID-19 response task team worked with the U.K.’s National Health Service, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Leeds Building Society to automate support functions including HR, personnel, finance, and vaccine development.

Speaking on Blue Prism helping during the pandemic Kingdon wrote: “The duration and impact of this pandemic are at this stage unknown, and as a result, we are taking action to invest and reinforce our product differentiation in preparation for the opportunities [that] will occur both in the short- and longer-term.”

Blue Prism has its headquarters in Warrington with additional offices in London, Austin, Sydney, Paris, Munich, and Washington. Currently, Blue Prism has a team of just over 1,000 people.